Complainant named five Respondents alleging their interconnectedness in registering and using domain names in bad faith, but the responses proved the parties to be two unrelated groups. Pierre Gaulin, Essiac International , Inc., and Essiac Products Services, Inc. v. Specialty Bottle Supply, Scott Eskenazi and Living Proof Health Products, All Canadian Health Products, Inc., Faith Jennings and Sibername.com, Privacy Service, FA0905001265296 (Nat. Arb. Forum July 20, 2009).
Paragraph 3(c) of the Policy provides that a complaint may relate to more than one domain name, provided that the domain names are registered by the same domain name holder. WIPO and the Nat. Arb. Forum proceed differently on this issue. WIPO Supplemental Rules do not add to or subtract from the definition of the Policy. The National Arbitration Forum provides its own definition supplemental to the Policy by defining the holder of a domain name as “the single person or entity as verified by the registrar” (Supplemental Rules 1(d)). In addition, the complainant has to comply with Rule 4(f) which states at subsection (ii) that “If the Panel determines that insufficient evidence is presented to link the alleged aliases, the domain names held by the unrelated registrants will not be subject to further consideration by that Panel.”
The Complainant attempted to make a case that the “multiple respondents should be treated as one respondent because all of the respondents financially benefit from the sale derived from their use of Complainant’s registered mark in the disputed domain names.” This overlooks the problem that the named respondents are unrelated and the domain names not registered by the same domain name holder.
The unrelated group was the registrant of <essiac.com>. Ironically, its spokeman stated in his response that “[w]e consent to the transfer of the domain name ... to the complainant.” However, rules being what they are the Panel ordered the complaint as against that group dismissed. No comparable case has been found in the WIPO database.
